From head to toe: Efficient somatosensory mapping with fast stimulation and multivariate pattern analysis.

Overview

1. Cognitive Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
2. Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

Abstract

Background: Somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) measured with electroencephalography (EEG) are widely used to study cortical responses to touch but most research has limited the focus on few body parts, typically a finger, and applied time-consuming testing protocols. To determine whether faster stimulation protocols can improve efficiency without compromising SEP and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) results, we compared fast and slow tactile stimulation across four body parts.

Methods: Fifteen participants received vibrotactile stimulation on the finger, hand, cheek, and foot while EEG was recorded. We compared a traditional “slow” stimulation protocol (800-1200 ms inter-stimulus intervals) with a “fast” protocol (300-500 ms). We compared temporal and topographical aspects between SEP and MVPA.

Results: Both stimulation protocols produced highly similar SEP components (P100, N140, P200), topographies, and classification results, while the fast protocol reduced testing time by about 60%. SEPs revealed systematic body-part differences, with earlier components for cheek stimulation and delayed responses for the foot. Multivariate classification distinguished body parts with accuracies up to ∼50-55% (chance: 25%), peaking around 100 ms after stimulus onset. Classifier weight maps closely matched SEP topographies over centroparietal electrodes, indicating that classification relied on physiologically meaningful somatosensory signals. Classification accuracy peaked around 100 ms after stimulus onset, coinciding with the SEP P100 component, but declined gradually thereafter, suggesting that early somatosensory responses contain particularly informative multivariate patterns that generalize over time.

Conclusions: Faster stimulation protocols substantially increase efficiency without compromising interpretability. Combining classical SEP analysis with multivariate classification provides complementary insights and offers a powerful framework for mapping somatosensory representations across the body.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

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Data Availability Statement

All code used for experimental testing and for data analysis are available in an online repository hosted on the website of the Open Science Framework, retrievable via https://osf.io/yx7wh/. The EEG data are available in a public online repository of the Austrian Neurocloud and can be retrieved via https://doi.org/10.60817/QQBF-1R49.

All data and code has been made available in public repositories and the links are provided in the article.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 2, 28 September 2026

• Authors: added Juliane Schubert (0000-0002-2536-6522); removed Juliane Schubert

Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 3 authors, 5 keywords, 1 funder, 41 references.

Cite

This paper

Fuchs, X., Schubert, J., & Heed, T. (2026). From head to toe: Efficient somatosensory mapping with fast stimulation and multivariate pattern analysis. Neuroimage. Reports, 6(3), 100378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ynirp.2026.100378

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